Old hack Dropbox touches millions of accounts

Document share website Dropbox was four years back hacked. Although Dropbox already announced that was the victim of a hack, is only now clear that as many as 69 million accounts.

The popular technology website Vice Motherboard got the data this week owned and published about it. Now it turns out that Dropbox for a long time what the size of the leak. Now the company has all affected users know that they need to change their password.

For many people, however, the risk will be lower than expected. From the leaked data show that 32 million passwords were encrypted and thus cleverly worthless on the online black market. The other, however, are usable, though even there the security seems good enough that not just all the user’s data can be captured.

The encryption of passwords with a so-called hash function. It is a rule that a password or other secret information to a new series of numbers, letters and punctuation marks. The original password is hardly to distract from such a hash, but you can see if a specified password matches the password in a database simply by the hash again on imports. So it is which in principle excellent secures passwords.

Sadly in the past not all hash functions were used

Some of the passwords was with an outdated hash encrypted and thereby (slightly) easier to crack. By hashed passwords are easier to steal (add a random line) increase your safety, however, the weather, and it seems that Dropbox has done this at all passwords.

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